Hasten column: Voucher program cost rising

The cost of having the Louisiana Scholarship Program keeps rising and it’s not just because more students are taking advantage of the opportunity to get a state-funded private school education.

Sure, about 6,750 kids are enjoying the benefit — about 2,000 more than the year before — but that’s not the only thing driving up the cost.

The average voucher costs the state about $5,300 a year. So, with roughly 6,750 students at an average of about $5,300, that’s $35.8 million.

The $5,300 is less than the state pays public schools but private schools get to take advantage of the transportation funded by public school systems and they generally pay their teachers less.

Also, they don’t have to provide special education services to children with various handicaps, ranging from minor to severe, like public schools do with state and federal funds. But voucher schools can’t refuse admission to those students.

Before you complain about the rising cost of providing vouchers, take a look at the rising cost of defending them.

A funding blunder — using money that the state constitution plainly says is dedicated to public parish and municipal school systems — led to a challenge that stretched all the way to the state Supreme Court.

The state’s attorney, former executive counsel to Gov. Bobby Jindal Jimmy Faircloth, lost in every legal step.

The court said if the state is going to have vouchers, it had to find a different way to fund them.

Superintendent of Education John White says the funding was in that year’s MFP, so the funds were transferred to vouchers.

After that was settled, at no small expense, the federal government gets into the act challenging whether the voucher program violates school integration orders issued years ago but still being enforced in many parishes.

In comes a national law firm hired by the Jindal administration.

Attorneys hired by the state to defend the voucher program are raking in the cash.

But apparently not enough, we learned at the latest meeting of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The state Department of Education got BESE’s approval to boost its voucher defense fund by $750,000.

The Washington, D.C., law firm Cooper and Kirk got a jump from $150,000 to $650,000 and the Faircloth Group’s contract jumped from $20,000 to as much as $270,000.

Besides vouchers, Faircloth is involved in an assortment of legal challenges to the governor’s education packages. He represents the Education Department in a challenge of the governor’s bill revamping tenure laws, teacher assessment and school board authority, which is headed to the Supreme Court after a district judge twice declared it unconstitutional.

A separate $410,000 contract through Attorney General Buddy Caldwell’s office pays that bill. The attorney general is required to defend state laws against challenges.

This past Friday Faircloth was in court fighting a lawsuit seeking to force the state to abide by its requirement to increase the $3.4 billion public school funding formula 2.75 percent.

When the Supreme Court threw out the 2012-13 funding formula, known as the MFP (Minimum Foundation Program), because it included vouchers, the state went back to the 2011-12 formula. That MFP had language saying that if a new one wasn’t adopted, the state had to increase that MFP 2.75 percent to cover cost increases.

The state didn’t do it, so another lawsuit was filed.

Mike Hasten is the capital bureau chief for Gannett Louisiana newspapers. He can be contacted by email at mhasten@gannett.com.